Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/203

THE PRINCE "It's enough of a reason, yes. But to be enough of a reason it has to be too much of a trouble. I mean for you. It has to be too much of a fight. You ask me what you've lost," Maggie continued to explain. "The not having to take the trouble and to make the fight—that's what you've lost. The advantage, the happiness of being just as you were—because I was just as I was—that's what you miss."

"So that you think," her father presently said, "that I had better get married just in order to be as I was before?"

The detached tone of it—detached as if innocently to amuse her by showing his desire to accommodate—was so far successful as to draw from her gravity a short light laugh. "Well, what I don't want you to feel is that if you were to I shouldn't understand. I should understand. That's all," said the Princess gently.

Her companion turned it pleasantly over. "You don't go so far as to wish me to take somebody I don't like?"

"Ah father," she sighed, "you know how far I go—how far I could go. But I only wish that if you ever should like anybody you may never doubt of my feeling how I've brought you to it. You'll always know that I know it's my fault."

"You mean," he went on in his contemplative way, "that it will be you who'll take the consequences?"

Maggie just considered. "I'll leave you all the good ones, but I'll take the bad."

"Well, that's handsome." He emphasised his sense of it by drawing her closer and holding her more tenderly. "It's about all I could expect of you. So far 173